Every XI Expansion Has A Female Companion.

Eh, the "Heroine" thing in every expansion is a Japanese thing (to have a young & endearing female lead).
Personally, I don't care if the lead character is male or female, as long as they're compelling and interesting, and do not feel like the choice of their gender is forced, to serve some agenda. In fact, when I noticed the trend with Aphmau, Lilisette etc, it kinda felt weird to me at first, but then I learned that it's just a Japanese thing.

And the notion that I'm way more likely to enjoy a game if it gave me virtual waifus irks me a little (and I like women as much as the next guy)

I do love Iroha, but I must admit when she calls the PC, "Master" it weirds me out a little

I didn't say the heroine, I said a companion. Companion is a whole other set of things, than playable character.

Incorrect.

Lion is super hands off, to the point of being told not to come to Tu'Lia by Gilgamesh. She does anyway and is in less CSes than Zeid.

In CoP, Prishe doesn't even show up until the end of Chapter 2. She definitely takes center stage after she shows up, but she's not in literally every single part of the story, and CoP's goal was an ensemble cast, which is what it had. But even barring that, Selh'teus is a more important character, as he kicks off the entire plot, and is more important than Prishe and rides in the PC's soul the whole way through.

ToAU, Aphmau doesn't show up until like Ashu Talif. Which is like 33% of the way through the entire story. She's super important, but ToAU literally beats you over the head with the PC being the most important factor in stopping the Grand Vizier. And The Middle Lands stake in things revolve around your character being a double agent. So you don't get too full of yourself, they have Naja treat you like dirt (affectionately).

WoTG, Lilisette doesn't show up until several missions in, and while the story and your motivations are drawn from her a lot more than prior expansions she shares the stage with the Adventurer pretty much equally, to down right relying on them completely when she can't handle Lady Lilith and her very existence becomes temporarily fragmented. Am I really just playing the side character if all of the most important things hinge upon my presence and performance?

SoA, Arciela is there right off the bat. She's royalty. We're a nobody. She's got the key to everything in Otharsyne. Pretty strong case again for us being the sidepiece and yet... We're the one drawing the 12 orders' eyes. We're the ones told we're the only one who can understand/help Arciela in her endeavors. We're the ones who contend with the Xol Triumvirate in order to even get access to Hades's inner sanctum. We're the ones who retrieve Saj'akka's lost scales. Again, am I really just playing the side character if all of the most important things hinge upon my presence and performance?

So yeah Boudox is female and that's kind of cool.

@zeig
I made a big post but this really isn't the place to talk about this kind of stuff.

So yeah Boudox is female and that's kind of cool.

If it makes you feel any better, I absolutely appreciated your post and totally had not thought of the goblin being the "expansion girl" for TVR. Had a good chuckle, thanks for posting it.

But holy sh*t people want to take things so far astray from the point of a fairly lighthearted post about a gobbie girl...

Eh, the "Heroine" thing in every expansion is a Japanese thing (to have a young & endearing female lead).

It does, whether you like it or not. We are animals, our brains evolved to be the way it is and that's how it is. You can resist against it, but it's still a base drive in our brains to be this way.

If you ever see a woman in danger in public, men will instinctively and instantly get up and try help her in a way almost all women will not. This is how we evolved. Women don't really have this trait, cause they didn't evolve to need it in the same way men did. They will deal with situations in a whole other way, usually screaming for help from men.

Even if what you say here is true, such difference can be overcomed with training. There are a lot of scientific evidence shows that learning can overrule human instincts.

There are a lot of jobs that requires dealing with emergency situations such as police, flight attendants, body guards etc. A trained female can do those jobs and react to situations perfectly fine.

That is why tropes are boring, because it is a super simplified generalization of reality. We need more diversity in our stories, not the other way around.

Funny how a few flops will knock some sense into a company.

Bytes have no gender

Of course they do. They're binary!